Postcard of the Day No. 103 Morlaix

A busy scene in the Breton market town of Morlaix where a narrow-gauge train operated by Chemins de Fer Armoricain, a metre-gauge network of lines built to connect small towns and neighbouring coastal settlements along the north coast of Finistère.  The Morlaix section opened in 1912 which may well be the year of the postcard. A group of women in Breton headdress are making their way into town, passing the modest but decoratively detailed station building, complete with édicule.  Above the train, the massive piers of a railway viaduct can be seen on its march across the steep sided valley in which the town is located.  What we see here is just the first level of the structure which has 9 arches - the upper level is more than 60 metres in height and has 14 arches.  Its presence is inescapable - it dominates the view from all districts of the town and must have been a hugely resented intrusion when it was under construction in 1861-63.  The lower level incorporated a pedestrian walkway but last time I was in Morlaix (more than 10 years ago) I discovered it locked and barred in a way that suggested it was unlikely to ever reopen.

After several years of construction the viaduct was fully opened in 1865 as a vital link in the main line from Paris to Brest operated by Chemins de Fer de l’Ouest. Today, up to 7 TGV services from Paris-Montparnasse cross overhead each day and the viaduct is protected as a national monument. These postcards are a reminder of how private commercial interests could transform a townscape that had evolved over many centuries by promising connectivity and future prosperity. At the same time public perception changes from outright hostility via gradual acceptance to popular veneration as a monument to engineering achievement.  The narrow-gauge railway was barely viable from the start and never generated enough traffic to pay its way - the convenience of delivering passengers to the heart of the town was offset by the lack of potential business in the sparsely populated hinterland. It closed for good in 1934 after only 22 years of service. Despite several visits to Morlaix over the years, I had no idea of its existence until I saw this postcard.

 

Bécassine - Breton Adventuress

An accident prone moon-faced Breton serving girl whose adventurous life was extensively recorded in a series of illustrated books in colour, widely regarded as among the earliest examples of what would later be known as bandes-dessinées (BD). Diligent but clumsy, Bécassine is naive and good natured, forever stumbling into danger and encounters with master-criminals. Habitually, her face is drawn without a mouth. On occasions when her mouth is shown it has no more weight than an apostrophe. Out of the house, she is rarely separated from her red umbrella which comes in handy whenever there’s a potential assassin to dispatch. The narrative proceeds via a grid of small coloured line drawings with explanatory text printed below. Much like the alternation of silent movie sequences and captions. Some pictures are emphasised by a circular enclosure - speech bubbles were still in the future. Bécassine began life in 1905 as a strip cartoon in a weekly comic. In 1905 the first book version was published - by 1962 there were 27 in the series. All but a few were illustrated with the lightest of touches by the magnificently named Émile-Joseph Porphyre Pinchon (J P Pinchon).

In this book (Les Mésaventures de Bécassine), our heroine has to deal with an idle and inept team of painters and decorators before heading for a remarkably diverse version of Paris where she stumbles from one adventure to another like the silly goose that she is. A bus ride to Trocadéro ends with her being co-opted as a Breton representative in an exhibition of French regional costumes. Events move fast and Bécassine is on a train to the seaside where she carries out her duties with exemplary devotion. Her Breton origins are the point of the books - there’s a long tradition of looking down on the Bretons on the part of metropolitan France. Especially for Parisians for whom they serve as dull and backward stereotypes, thus validating the high esteem in which they hold themselves. Residents of Brittany take exception to this and point to the region’s rating as 5th. in France in terms of GDP per capita. The city and region of Rennes has for decades been one of the fastest growing in France. But the need to have someone to look down on is very strong and it may be the fate of the Bretons to continue to play this role despite all evidence to the contrary. Finally Bécassine was filmed as a live-action movie released in 2018 which I suppose is a tribute to its enduring appeal. It might be of some interest if only to see if the leading player has had her lips digitally erased.

Past and Present: Brittany

Morbihan in southern Brittany has one of the greatest concentrations of megaliths to be found anywhere. There are so many that you get used to spotting them in unlikely surroundings – adjacent to a filling station, next to a modern house, in the middle of a forest or on the cliff tops of the Quiberon peninsula. This fine dolmen is located at the point where two roads diverge in the middle of the tiny village of Crucuno. It was recorded about 100 years ago by this postcard photographer. A century is a very small time in the life of a megalith so we should not be surprised that so little has changed when it was photographed again in March 2008. The entrance has been altered and the render removed from the wall of the neighbouring house, otherwise all is as it was. We get used to seeing these structures surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of landscaped open space but in my view, they lose none of their mystery when they’re encountered in the midst of modern development. If anything, the sense of incongruity is enhanced.